[edtech] Ed Tech Partners meeting notes - 6/6/2005

[Jean Foster]

Present: Babi Mitra (AMPS), Margret Branchowski (Dspace), Dee Kane 
(Sloan), Janet Wasserstein (DUE?), Kimberle Koile (Csail), Carol Sardo 
(Linc), Jean Foster (IS&T Academic Computing), Margaret Meehan (AMPS), 
Craig Counterman (AMPS-Stellar), Katie Vale (IS&T Academic Computing), 
Molly Ruggles (SMA), Peter Hess (SMA)

(Please let me know if I got anyone's update details wrong.)

Ed Tech Partners next year
There will be fewer meetings (bi-monthly or semesterly) and they will 
be project updates and discussions.  Featured speakers will be invited 
to present at the Crosstalk seminar series which all Ed Tech Partners 
are invited to attend.

Linc
(Carol Sardo): Project to bridge the divide in online learning between 
developing nations and MIT. Third Linc Symposium to be held in Aug. 
will attract attendees from all over the world to share best practices 
and resources.  MIT Faculty Advisory Board is helping them to identify 
more narrow focus...should they become a professional society or a 
funding source to create learning communiites in dev countries using 
MIT assets?

SMA2 & related projects
  (Molly Ruggles & Peter Hess) - SMA2 beginning.  Primary focus is to 
provide  Singapore students with more engagement with MIT. They will 
spend one semester on campus( instead of a few weeks in SMA1). Students 
in SMA II will get a degree from MIT & their home institute (2 
masters); they must apply to MIT and adhere to all of the MIT standards 
but they are funded by Singapore. 50 - 100 students; there will be 5 or 
6 programs.  There will be more use of research interaction groups, 
small video conference rooms to support PhD students.  More research 
oriented than SMA1.  SMA2 runs until 2012.

- Asynchronous class delivery: looking into different methods. 
Currently using Real Player 1 with powerpoint slides and video of 
lecturer synchronized.  New software called Apreso Classroom 
pre-formats everything into a single screen allowing technicians to tap 
into the video display.  This allows annotations to be captured. It 
relies on ethernet so can be used in classrooms other than level 5 
classrooms.  AMPS can wheel video equipment into the room to tape a 
presentation.  The lectures can be placed in Dspace.  (Dspace doesn't 
yet have a streaming server but they would do it if there was interest) 
  SMA content is already available to anyone at MIT.

- Web conferencing: Looking at different online conference systems.  
Currently use netmeeting.

- Boston Ed Tech Group: (Peter Hess) has pulled together a Boston Ed 
Tech group, similar to this group but open to schools in the Boston 
area, sponsored by NERCOMP.  If people are interested in being added to 
the mailing list they can join by sending email to phess at mit.edu.

FRADS: - (Janet Wasserstein) - finds funding for ed tech projects.  
Janet will be presenting at the 11th Cambridge International Conference 
on Distance Learning. If anyone finds a foundation that provides ed 
tech project money, let Janet know.   (janetw at mit.edu)

Classroom Learning Partner
( Kimberle Koile) - Csail tablet PC research projects.  Instructor puts 
up in-class exercises (based on Conference XP distributed presentation 
system).  Instructor & students all use tablets (digital ink). Question 
is placed on slide and students submit their answer to the instructor's 
machine which then gets turned into a Powerpoint slide.  This works 
best for 8 or 10 students. This project will make it scale to a class 
of 300.  (Kimberle is an AI specialist). They will build software to 
aggregate the answers into equivalence classes.  Similar to the 
personal response system (PRS) polling. 3 students are working on the 
tools, authoring, sketch,)  Working with Rudy in TLL.  They would like 
the tablet PCs to be built into the furniture.  (Others working with 
Tablet PC technology - Rutledge Ellis-Benhke BCS, Ian Waites in Aero 
Astro,)
*Molly Ruggles has a few Wacom Tablets in their office that Kimberle 
can try out.

Academic Computing Projects
- Clusters and Spaces group:  Linux and PC cluster, MAC cluster, and 
some collaborative learning spaces. Looking at similar spaces in dorms
- Software dev group: 3 projects: Narravision (Visualizing Cultures).  
Scaffolding tool for professional science and eng software to make it 
easier for novices.
- Curriculum Integration group (Ed Tech Consultants):  Cultura 
re-write; electronic portfolios project, pilots of blogs and wikis; 
course 6 class); exploring guided enquiry systems for simulations 
(working with CECI and John Belcher); possible pilot this fall;
- AMPS/Academic Computing Fall targeted Pilots: Sakai gradebook, 
assesment tool, image repository search, Sakai core sandbox; Stellar 
usability improvements to request process & archiving
- Image repository management tools discovery project: (I forgot to 
mention this one during the meeting!)  Jean is gathering requirements 
in order to determine scope of this work. Academic Customers include 
School of Architecture, SHASS, Media Lab, & non-academic users include 
PSB, Sloan, MIT Museum, etc.  Report and recommendations will be done 
this summer.

Dspace
-  70 other Dspace users around world (that they know of) 2nd Dspace 
users meeting in Cambridge, UK in July.  MIT content addition of 
digital theses (10 - 11k thesis over summer) and from now on all theses 
will be in Dspace (scanned).
- 3 research projects:
1. Archiving OCW sites: (Bill Reilly)  protocols for getting sites from 
OCW into Dspace;  Sloan can get a website out of Dspace into 
Sloanspace. Instructors can pull the data into Sloanspace. Year two 
will work on how the faculty can do this themselves.
2. Search project called Similie - tools that help search systems that 
use different metadata schemas using RDF.
3. National archiving experiment - national archives and san diego 
super computer center to come up with a strategie to use the software 
they developed to used world distributed computers to archive large 
amounts of data.
* Margret : will send the URL

SloanSpace
.LRN focussing on user feedback for SloanSpace.   Re-org in Sloan IT,  
that brings it into alignment with IS&T reorg.  DeeDee in in Sloan 
Academic Computing.  What is Sloan Academic Computing.  Simulation 
games in trading and negotiation games that run on SloanSpace.  * Maybe 
we could see demos of that next fall? Focus is continuation on 
enhancements: search and facelift & calendar package functionality and 
usability.

AMPS:
1. Course management - Stellar: 514 courses on stellar in Spring '05; 
eReserves pilot; integration with registrar's data; future - exploring 
how to converge into one system (currently working with Sloan)
2. Sakai- ( ~ 80 partners): how does it move forward
3. Media-enabled classrooms SDM, Cambridge, SMA program; working with 
DUE on classroom planning.
4. Rich media production; Video content for OCW; community events;  
multi media for research grants.
5. Hawk cam - none this year
6. Walt Disney wants to use Stellar (name?) for their distance learning